Home Schooling
by Connie Nervegas
Summary: One shot. A typical school day with the turtles. Dedicated to all home schoolers.


_Because I was home schooled and so were the boys. I don't know if this will amuse anybody but a home schooler, but oh well. It explains why home schooled siblings end up so close. You just get to know them all way too well._

**7:02am**

Donatello sat at the living room computer skimming Wikipedia. As soon as his feet touched the floor he had a cup of coffee in his hand and had planted himself at the computer to check his email.

"Is today a training day or a school day?" Mikey said, from where he lay on the couch, still half asleep, watching the morning farm report.

"School day," Raph said, sticking pop tarts into the toaster.

Mikey pulled himself up to see Raph. "Hey, don't. I was going to make bacon."

"Well, get to it. And I can eat more anyway."

Don scrolled down the page and said, "Did you guys know that 'fuck' can be used as any part of speech?"

"Yeah," Raph said, laughing.

Mikey stumbled stiffly into the kitchen and pulled out enough food to feed twelve people. "Morning, Sensei."

Master Splinter happily hummed to himself as he put the tea kettle on the stove. It was part of his morning ritual. "Good morning, everyone. Where is Leonardo? Is he awake?"

"He went to bed at 3am," Raph said, stuffing half a pop tart in his mouth at once. "I decided to let the sleeping dragon lie."

"You must wake him. You have math lessons this morning."

"Tried and failed. Plus, he'll attack me if I try again," Raph said lazily, licking his fingers clean.

"Try again," Sensei said.

**7:38am**

Raph poked Leo in the side with his sai. Leo was lying on his face, his mouth wide open and his arms and legs splayed out. Raph could have sworn that Leo had started out with his head at the opposite end of the bed.

"Rise and shine, cupcake," Raph said.

Leo grumbled, "Touch me again and I'll murder you."

Raph sat at the kitchen table and said, "He threatened fratricide again. Somebody else try."

**8:19am**

Don stood next to Leo's bed and said, "Leonardo Hamato, there is a naked woman in bed with you. She's super hot and wants your body."

"Tell her to go away."

"Splinter's going to break out the air horn if you don't get up."

Leo whined quietly into his pillow, but didn't move.

"Why'd you go to bed so late?" Don said, sitting on the bed and forcing Leo towards the wall. He covered his head with a blanket. "I know you have this problem with needing a full ten hours of sleep. Seems to me like you'd go to bed accordingly."

Leo sat up slowly and said, "I would have, but Raph was in the dojo trying to bench 400 pounds and I couldn't leave him there without a spotter. Not after what happened last week."

"We have math this morning. I have lots of problems ready." He was actually excited. Leo collapsed back into bed.

**9:23am**

Leo sat so heavily at the kitchen table that the sugar bowl clanked with the impact.

Raph sneered and said, "If this had been an emergency situation where you needed emergency rousing, then you would have been dead over two hours ago."

Their leader mumbled something that sounded like a threat.

"You must work on disciplining yourself so that you are able to wake up on time," Master Splinter said. "I know that it is difficult."

"Yes, Sensei," Leo said. He dumped some food on his plate and fell asleep in his chair waiting for the oatmeal to be passed in his direction.

**10:47am**

Don stacked books, papers, notebooks and calculators in the middle of the dojo and waited patiently for his brothers, glancing at the schedule. He was supposed to be halfway through the lesson by now.

Mikey walked past the dojo entrance carrying a screwdriver.

Raph was yelling in the living room, "What happened to all the problems we did last week? I wanted to use the same notebook. You threw it away, didn't you?"

Pause. Leo's voice said, "This is some kind of torture. Wake me up out of a deep sleep and make me do math problems. Just put bamboo shoots under my fingernails."

Raph said, "Hey, there's yarn wrapped around this. Move the chair…"

"DOW dropped a few points again," Leo said.

Don rolled his eyes. The typical time-wasting living room talk.

Mikey walked back past the doorway with the screw driver. He rattled around out of Don's vision and then crossed the doorway again holding a wrench.

"Hey, what happened?" Don asked him.

"Oh, Splinter locked himself in the bathroom again."

**11:02am**

"Maybe I should move my things into this room," Master Splinter's voice echoed through the bathroom door. "I spend so much time in here lately."

"Oh, don't say that, Father," Leo said, his voice dripping with guilt.

Raph banged his fist on the door and watched as the makeshift doorframe that was fitted in the brick tunnel opening wobbled uncertainly. "Let's just knock it down."

"I spent three weeks building this stupid frame!" Don said, as he worked at picking the lock. "And I'm not about to redo it all. I don't know where to get any more pallets for the wood right now."

Mikey was eating a cookie with one hand and reading a trashy romance novel with the other. "Just take the hinges off."

"I would, but they're corroded."

**11:32am**

Finally, they were all in the dojo. But Raph was lifting weights, Leo was snuggled under his blanket with his head on his pillow and Mikey was reading graphically described and overinflated sexual encounters in his novel.

"Let's get to work," Don said.

Raph let the weights hit the floor with a crash. "What are you reading?" he asked Mikey.

Raph snatched the book away from Mikey's hands and read aloud, "'Colt grabbed Nicole and spun her around, her golden tresses falling on her heaving bosoms. The sweat glistened on his tanned and muscular chest as he reached up her petticoats and…'"

"Yeah, that's enough," Don said, confiscating the book.

"We should mark that down as our biology lesson," Leo muttered from his bed.

"Huh, yeah," Raph laughed.

Don kicked Leo in the shell. "Hey, wake up. We're starting."

"M'awake."

**12:06pm**

Don wrote "Simplify |x - 2| - 4|-6|" on a small white board and propped it up against his knees. Leo neatly wrote down the problem. Mikey stared at it, wrinkling up his nose for a second and then wrote it down, scribbling and erasing several times. Raph looked at the problem for a few seconds and then said, "Negative x, negative 22."

Leo sighed. Don erased the problem and wrote "Simplify 2x - 4y = 9" on the white board.

Raph said, "X equals 9 halves."

"Stop saying the answers!" Don said. "Give others a chance," he said, nodding significantly to Mike, who was squinting at the white board and then at his own answer, clearly confused.

Raph leaned over to Mike and said, "No, what you do is…"

"Don't tell him how to do it," Don said. "He'll never figure it out if you two always help him."

Leo was leaning against the wall with his eyes shut and his hands folded on top of his notebook.

"Leo, wake up!" Don demanded.

Leo didn't open his eyes and said, "I'm awake. I'm resting my eyes. Continue."

"Well, give us something hard then," Raph said. "You're making it too easy."

Don tried not to say anything sarcastic. Raph was always bragging about his ability to do math in his head since he considered it one of his only talents besides fighting, swearing, and doing laundry.

"Okay, fine. A hard one." He couldn't repress an evil cackle.

**12:08pm**

Raph was already done and gone. Leo stuck his notebook full of equations and numbers under Don's nose and got a curt nod of approval. Mikey was still erasing and rewriting.

"I hate math," Mikey said, tearing a hole in the paper with his eraser. "Why do we have to do school?"

"Yeah," Don said, looking over Mikey's shoulder at his drastically inaccurate problem. "It's too much to ask for ninjas to be able to read, write and do basic math."

**12:27pm**

Leo was back in bed and Raph was sitting at the computer, staring at pictures of motorcycles that he could never afford. Mikey sat next to Splinter on the couch, rewriting the problem on a clean page that wasn't destroyed by erasing.

"Okay," he said, taking a deep breath. "Starting over again."

"You can stop if you want," Don said, guilt creeping up on him.

"No, I'll get it," Mike said.

**1:59pm**

"Hurry up!" Leo yelled. He had just rolled out of bed and was now fully awake and fully aware of how behind schedule they were. "We were supposed to eat lunch two hours ago!"

Mikey was lying on the couch with his feet in Raph's lap. Raph was reading, "'Then, as she realized that Colt was about to leave her life forever…'"

"Why?" Mikey asked.

"Oh, he's going to enlist in the civil war. '…she knew that she loved him.' It's about time, Nicole. You've fucked the guy, like, twenty times already. 'He wrapped his iron arms around her delicate waist and drew her against him. She was overcome by the musky smell that…"

"Musk? What's that?"

"Uh…" Raph tapped his forehead a few times with the book. "I think it's that smell like when a cat turns up on the furniture. Anyway, '…that permeated his body. As his hands wandered her silken skin, they lay back in the hay…'"

"Aren't they in the library?"

"That was last chapter. They're in the barn now. She's going out riding because she was going to go out to that cliff to jump…"

"Oh, yeah. Seems like doing it in the hay would be uncomfortable. Bugs and all."

Raph repressed a shudder.

Leo was frantically gathering school supplies and mounding them on the kitchen table, while Master Splinter watched with amusement. "What are you doing, my sons?" he asked, well aware of what they were all doing.

Raph hid the book behind his shell and said, "Uh… just reading… English, you know…"

Leo threw a literature volume on the table and one of table legs creaked. "English… English… Kafka…"

"Oh, don't make us read him again," Mikey said, not bothering to sit up.

Raph threw Mikey's legs off his lap and said, "Yeah, we don't need to be as depressed as you are."

**3:17pm**

Leo scratched his head as he struggled to understand Franz Kafka. His pupils, meanwhile, struggled to understand the adventures of Nicole de Bardeau of Atlanta, Georgia's Honeysuckle Plantation.

"Dude, how could she hook up with that other guy this late in the game?" Mikey asked, as Raph read over his shoulder.

"I thought Gregory got shot by the overseer already," Raph said, pointing to a specific line.

"That means that the baby could be Gregory's or Colt's," Don observed, hoping to sound unconcerned with the heroine's outcome.

"What did the Law symbolize?" Leo asked.

Raph took the book away from Mikey. "She can't join a convent. She ain't Catholic."

"Well, she should convert. Otherwise Gregory's wife is going to try to kill… See! Look at the next page! Olive stabs her with a letter opener!"

Leo leaned down and let his forehead touch the kitchen table. "What did the Law symbolize in 'The Trial,' people?"

"The law?" Raph said absently as he flicked through "Passion Never Dies."

Mikey said, "What do you think it symbolized?"

Leo stuttered and flipped a few pages, frantically looking for an answer.

"You didn't even read it!" Don said. "And you're getting on us because we didn't read it? All Josef K. does is screw up his chances of getting out of the charge. And we never even find out what he was charged with or why. What's up with that? What's there to read?"

"This is a deep and symbolic look at Czech life and Kafka's view of Czech national identity and the meaningless nature of bureaucracy."

"I'll read it if I ever go to Prague," Mikey said, picking up the romance novel again.

**5:31pm**

"Hey, it's my turn!" Mikey said, as he watched the computer screen over Leo's shoulder. "Your farm has, like, 800 cows and 400 sheep. You've been on Facebook for more than an hour."

"I have to pick this cotton before it withers," Leo said over a flurry of mouse clicks.

Don shoved the unfinished math problem in Mikey's hands. He sat sadly on the couch and resumed scratching out and erasing.

"We should read 'Dracula' again," Raph said, as he turned a page of "The Trial." "I actually liked that."

**10:17pm**

Raph and Leo's voices echoed ahead of them as they returned from one of the tunnels. "Well, it wasn't fair," Raph said. He wandered around, looking for something to kick dramatically.

"Don't be such a crybaby," Leo said, smirking as Raph kicked the end of couch.

Mikey's head snapped up. He had been sleeping over his math problem.

"You're still doing school?" Raph asked, taking the math problem out of his hands and inspecting his lack of progress.

"Guess so," he said, yawning and stretching. "What were you guys doing?"

Raph remembered that he was mad and Leo laughed at him, pointing as he flared up. Raph said, "We were trying out that BB gun that we found, right? And Mr. Perfect figures it out in one shot and hits the target. So he keeps sending me out in the tunnel, telling me to move it and then shooting me in the shell whenever I turned my back on him."

"Why didn't you just tell him to move it himself?" Mikey asked, turning his attention back to the math problem.

Raph crossed his arms. "Well, it sounds obvious now… Tomorrow I'm going to shoot you! And I won't be aiming for your shell!"

Leo mumbled noncommittally as he wandered into the bathroom.

"I'LL SHOOT YOU IN YOUR SOFT FUCKING SKULL! BETTER YET, YOUR ASS!"

"Where's the mouthwash?" Leo asked from the bathroom.

"Kitchen. I'll get it." Raph went dutifully to the kitchen to fetch the mouthwash.

Leo sat on the couch next to Mikey and watched as he stuck out his tongue in concentration. Mikey yelled and threw the notebook at the TV. "It's pointless! I'll never get it!"

"Where's Don?" Leo asked.

Raph returned from the kitchen with the mouthwash and waved it in front of Leo's face, as Leo ignored him.

"In the lab," Mikey said.

Raph tapped Leo on the side of the head repeatedly with the bottle of mouthwash, determined to get an acknowledgement.

**11:12pm**

Leo's voice rang out from the lab. "WHY DID YOU DO THAT? YOU LEFT HIM DOING THAT DAMN PROBLEM FOR OVER EIGHT HOURS! WHAT WOULD YOU THINK IF I LEFT YOU READING THOREAU FOR EIGHT HOURS?"

Don's voice quietly responded to Leo's shouting.

"WELL, I DON'T CARE! GO OUT THERE AND APOLOGIZE!"

Raph glared at the lab door. "Make a deal, Fearless. That's helpful."

Mikey had forgotten that he had been left to languish over the same homework problem all day long and was contentedly playing a video game.

The lab door opened and the sounds of Don's sobbing filled the room. Raph groaned and fled to his bedroom, escaping the tears before he was forced to be a part of the hugging. Leo stood behind Don, glaring, arms crossed.

Don wiped his eyes and sobbed out, "Mikey, I'm so sorry. I thought I was helping."

Mikey threw his controller aside and hugged Don without any time spent considering the apology. "It's okay, Don. Don't cry. I know you just want us all to be smart like you. Leo, you shouldn't have yelled at him like that," Mikey said, as he rubbed Don's shell. "We all know that you're sleep deprived and all. Don't take it out on us."

"I'm sorry," Leo said. He headed towards his bedroom, hanging his weary head.

Master Splinter came out of his bedroom, holding a book in his hand, oblivious to the outbursts and greeted Leo with, "Hello, son. How has your evening been?"

"I'M GOING TO BED!" Leo shouted emotionally, at nobody in particular.

Raph's muffled voice said from behind his closed bedroom door, "Good riddance!"

Mikey handed a controller to Don, who was hiccupping loudly. "It wouldn't be a school day if it didn't end with tears and recriminations," Mikey said, laughing.


End file.
